After weeks of apprehension and controversy, Carnival not only rolled in post-Katrina New Orleans, it rocked.

Spectacular weather, larger-than-expected crowds and relatively exemplary conduct highlighted a two-week celebration that city officials hope will serve as a catalyst for the economic and psychological recovery of the storm-ravaged city.

Even with crowds at only about 70 percent of normal years, tourism officials said early projections indicated a $200 million economic impact from Carnival's second weekend and incalculable benefits in positive exposure from national and international media.

"Mardi Gras was a smoke signal to the rest of the world that New Orleans is on its way back," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said. "They got the message."

Carnival did not pass without a major crime -- most notably a fatal hit-and-run accident after a parade in Uptown last week -- but city officials found little to complain about Wednesday, as workers continued the task of cleaning the mountains of trash and debris throughout town.

'Pretty safe,' 'pretty clean'

Crews from the city's Sanitation and Parks and Parkways departments, the Housing Authority of New Orleans and the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office worked vigorously Monday to clean the mounds of debris that lined the primary parade route from its Uptown starting point to its finish downtown. On Wednesday afternoon, several teams worked on the neutral grounds on St. Charles Avenue, which looked surprisingly litter-free other than a discarded crop of several large items of furniture and a barbecue grill in the 4200 block.

The French Quarter, however, was another story. Ankle-deep piles of trash lined long portions of the sidewalks in the first several blocks of Bourbon Street off Canal Street.

Veronica White, the director of the Sanitation Department, said the city's fleet of about 125 workers started trash and debris cleanup immediately after Tuesday's parades and should be finished by early next week. Aided by street sweepers, bulldozers, garbage trucks and street flushers, laborers systematically attacked different parts of the city at different times.

"The city is pretty safe, and it's pretty clean," Nagin said. "Our people stepped up big to make this as successful a Mardi Gras as we've had in the past."

What they miss, volunteers will try to pick up during a series of citywide cleanups Saturday. The Rex organization and the Katrina Krewe will join forces to clean up the Uptown parade route Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon. The Algiers Economic Development Foundation will sponsor its fourth annual Clean Sweep Saturday from 8 a.m. to noon in Algiers.

"Several weeks ago people kept asking how can you justify having Mardi Gras; now the question is how you justify not having Mardi Gras," said Darrius Gray, the president of the Greater New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association. "This was the springboard we needed going into the French Quarter Festival and Jazzfest."

Super Sunday

Picture-perfect weather attracted huge crowds Sunday night, when superkrewes Bacchus and Endymion made an unprecedented back-to-back run because of a concern about rain on Saturday night, when Endymion had been scheduled to roll. Using trash removal as a gauge, city officials said Sunday's crowds were larger than those on Fat Tuesday, traditionally the most attended day of the two-week celebration.

Sandy Shilstone, the president and CEO of the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp., said an unprecedented 1,250 credentials were issued by the city to more than 300 news outlets worldwide. Shilstone said news outlets from just about every continent, including every European country, as well as Russia, Taiwan, Australia and China were represented.

"It reversed months of negative imagery," said Stephen Perry, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan and Convention Bureau. "CNN broadcast eight consecutive hours of nonstop coverage. You could not put a price tag on that type of value."

Perry estimated the two-weekend turnout was about 70 percent the size of recent years, but that number was due primarily to unusually low numbers on the first weekend, when the weather was overcast and chilly. Perry said crowds Sunday and Tuesday were as strong as ever, based on anecdotal evidence. On those days, he said, the crowds outside his office on St. Charles Avenue were more than twice as deep as normal, and the ones lining the end of the parade route on Tchoupitoulas Street in the Warehouse District were more than five times as deep.

The city's limited hotel space prevented the crowds from being even larger, Perry said. He said the city enjoyed a tremendous "drive-in crowd" Sunday and Tuesday, but that many would-be visitors were turned away because of the housing shortage.

The city had only 15,000 hotel rooms available to tourists, less than half its normal availability, Gray said. Of the 25,000 rooms in operation, about 10,000 were being used by relief workers and displaced storm victims. Before Katrina, the city had about 38,600 rooms available.

Louis Armstrong International Airport experienced its busiest air travel day since it resumed limited passenger service Sept. 13, Perry said. City officials reported capacity crowds on all of the 100 available flights.

Eating up the business

The Louisiana Restaurant Association also issued a positive report, despite mustering less than a third of its pre-Katrina work force. It was too early to tell Wednesday, but anecdotal evidence suggests the restaurant business was hopping throughout the weekend, especially in the French Quarter and Uptown.

Melvin Rodrigue said the city could have handled even more out-of-town business but that only 1,265 restaurants have reopened in the New Orleans area since the storm. Seventy thousand people once worked in the restaurant industry, but now about 20,000 make a living at it the Crescent City.

"This was the shot in the arm we needed," Rodrigue said. "This was our first opportunity on the world stage to show N.O. was ready to rebuild."

Arrests were down almost 60 percent from 2005, and beyond the hit-and-run, no major incidents related to Mardi Gras were reported, New Orleans Police Chief Warren Riley said. Officers made 632 Mardi Gras-related arrests, compared with 1,574 last year. Of the arrests, 282 occurred in the 8th District, which consists of the French Quarter and Central Business District. Of those, 91 were for public intoxication, 21 for lewd conduct, six for guns and two for narcotics. Riley said 52 narcotics arrests were made outside the 8th District during that span. Overall, 900 arrests were made citywide, Riley said.

"By any measure, this was one of the most successful Mardi Gras ever," Perry said.

Mixed results

The smaller crowds hurt some businesses.

Frank Downs, the vice president of popular Bourbon Street bar The Cats Meow, said his business was down about 40 percent from previous seasons.

"Anytime you can walk out on the balcony at midnight and see the pavement on Bourbon Street, you know it's off," Downs said.

Still, Downs said he endorsed city officials' decision to stage the event.

"It's encouraged us to get back in business," he said. "I'm sure it was a revenue producer for the city, and if there's one thing the city needs right now it's money."

Only a few doors down the street, another local mecca, Tropical Isle, had a different story.

Earl Bernhardt, co-owner of the three Bourbon Street bars that made their name by selling the wildly popular hand grenade drink, said business at his five French Quarter businesses was up from a year ago. In fact, he said sales at the Orleans Grapevine Wine Bar and Bistro on Monday and Tuesday night were the highest in the restaurant's four-year history.

"It was one of the best Carnivals we've ever had," Bernhardt said. "It reminded me of Carnival back in the old days. It was a kinder, gentler crowd. Everybody was in a good mood. I even saw someone bump into somebody in the crowd and say, 'Excuse me.' "

Emergency preparations

New Orleans' doctors and nurses kept up with a steady stream of cases during Carnival's last weekend, but only because two tent compounds had been set up to augment the area's bare-bones emergency medical system, hospital officials said.

Without the tents from Florida and North Carolina, the medical network "would have been in total collapse," said Cindy Matherne, a member of the team that helped coordinate emergency medical care during Carnival.

"We were already at maximum capacity in our emergency rooms. Many had to go on hold," she said.

The federal government sent in both tent complexes. The one from North Carolina was to leave its site at Tulane and South Claiborne avenues Wednesday, but the Florida unit, on Canal Street, will stay until Friday, said Karen Troyer-Caraway, a Tulane University Hospital vice president.

As a spokeswoman for the only permanently operating downtown emergency room, Troyer-Caraway worked closely with personnel at both of those compounds and at another temporary facility that the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center has been operating in the upriver end of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. It is set to move this weekend into the New Orleans Centre space that the Lord & Taylor department store used to occupy.

The temporary sites were used primarily for complaints that could be treated there, such as minor fractures and cuts, without requiring further attention in a hospital.

Because of the tents, waits at hospital emergency rooms throughout the area were "minimal," Troyer-Caraway said.

At Touro Infirmary, the emergency room staff had been beefed up because the hospital is slightly more than a block from the Uptown parade route on St. Charles Avenue.

But the predicted 40 percent increase "never materialized," Touro spokeswoman Debbie Reed said, adding that the hospital actually had fewer emergency cases than had been anticipated.

"This leads us to believe that the revelers were paying more attention to recommendations that they practice moderation and have a safe and well Carnival season this year," she said.

A similar report came from East Jefferson General Hospital, near the Metairie parade route, where the staff treated 670 cases in the last four days of Carnival, compared with 680 during the same period last year, spokeswoman Valerie Englande said.

Because fewer emergency rooms in the New Orleans area were open, that number "is kind of surprising to me," she said.

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Michael Perlstein, John Pope and Gordon Russell contributed to this report.

Jeff Duncan can be reached at jduncan@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3452.